Avatar: The Way of Water is set on another planet, and its making was on a scale almost out of this world.
The production involved secret boat missions, a constellation of Kiwi contractors, eye-popping budgets, and lots of real-life action.
Just ahead of the movie’s release this week, Academy Award-winning art director Kim Sinclair shared some of the movie’s secrets.
Avatar’s three sequels have so far injected an estimated $774 million into New Zealand, compared to the $154.8m rebate from the publicly funded NZ Screen Production Grant.
Auckland-born Sinclair, Avatar’s supervising art director, said filmmakers tapped into local boatbuilding expertise.
One boat in the movie is a big naval command vessel, Matador, codenamed CMAT during production. The second was Picador, codenamed CPIC, a 10m long and fast, heavily armed naval patrol boat.
“The rub here was that during production it was decided it should be a real ocean-going vessel,” Sinclair told the Herald.
The fearsome Picador was a twin Hamilton-jet, using technology derived from that which Kiwi father of the jetboat Sir William “Bill” Hamilton pioneered.
Sinclair said he worked with a talented young Christchurch boat designer on the boat, which had supercharged V8 Chevrolet engines, producing 1000 horsepower. By comparison, the famous Shotover Jet’s twin V8 engines produce a combined 700 horsepower.
Secret sea trials were carried out, first on the Kaipara, launched from a farm through a mangrove swamp to keep away from prying eyes.
Sinclair said another was a dawn mission 75km north of Auckland at Omaha, with tarpaulins disguising the boat.
And a third off the Kapiti coast was an ocean trial with weapons.
“We had to outrun an inquisitive fishing boat on this occasion,” Sinclair said.
Big sets
All live action shooting and visual effects for the Avatar sequels happened in New Zealand. The movies demanded some big sets, and many of them - 174, to be exact.
“Of these 84 are what we call Zulu sets, typically terrain sets made of blue painted timber, with real greens elements - plants, rocks, dirt, water,” Sinclair said.
The rest were architectural sets, essentially buildings and vehicles. 13 were built in tanks for filming on or under the water, with three tanks in Auckland and two in Wellington.
For The Way of Water, two aircraft from director James Cameron’s original Avatar movie were rebuilt.
“One had been cut up and the parts stored in a warehouse in the California desert,” Sinclair said. “And we built three new aircraft, two submarines and three boats.”
The sets were complex and had to meet high finishing standards and precise parameters.
“The physical set has to line up exactly with the digital model, to the order of about 6mm accuracy,” Sinclair said.
That was not too tricky for a laboratory or vehicle, but demanding with a rock face.
The process of aligning the virtual world with the physical set on the stage used a technology called simulcam, which is a camera system simulating a computer-generated environment, allowing live-action filmmakers to interact with virtual content.
“We all understand the idea of aliens, played by actors on a performance capture volume, wearing their digital skins, inhabiting a virtual environment,” Sinclair said, “but in fact, far more world-building goes on than that.”
Anything an actor interacted with - leaves, vegetation, props, weapons, furniture, or doors - had to be accounted for.
Sinclair said he’d worked all over the world with construction supervisor Neil Kirkland, and the pair shared several construction philosophies.
“It’s better to take longer with a smaller team to design and fabricate the sets. This allows ideas to ferment and settle, and eases the supervision as things happen at a slower pace.”
Sinclair said he and Kirkland preferred a smaller, highly skilled team to lots of labourers doing overtime.
“Secondly, get the design right, and do more work at the documentation stage. It’s better to do your thinking at the drawing board rather than on the workshop floor,” Sinclair added.
The production became a huge training ground for tradies and graduates.
“Most of our set designers are young architecture graduates that we have trained up. Several individual sets took more than a year for a set designer to document,” Sinclair added.
Since conflict between a soulless, wasteful culture and a more spiritual, sustainable one is a key theme of the Avatar series, it made sense to try minimise pollution and waste during production.
Sinclair said Avatar tried to use clean, sustainable approaches in carpentry and 3D modelling.
“On that subject we favour additive manufacturing over reductive carving. It is much less wasteful, and more sustainable. Almost no polystyrene was used in the production of Avatar.”
Instead, crew used traditional plaster techniques to form complex shapes whenever possible, or 3D printing.
“Another important tenet we work by is to contract out as much work as possible,” Sinclair added.
“We are not in the business of building empires. Anything that can be done by an organisation already out in the economy will be used by us.”
Using many contractors allowed for parallel manufacturing, with many parts arriving at the same time for assembly.
That, he said, was similar to aerospace manufacturing. And it helped reduce space required for the production and department set-up costs.
Another upshot was the Avatar sequels weren’t an esoteric world of industry insiders.
Sinclair said very few contractors were actually full-time film business people. That meant more contract management and outside supervision was required, but he said it was a worthwhile trade-off.
“We couldn’t have made The Way of Water without all the brilliant contractors who worked on it, from one-man jobbers to large corporations,” Sinclair said.
West is best
More than 1400 crew were contracted over five years, with at least 90 per cent of them New Zealand citizens. And at least 994 Kiwi extras, stunt artists, cast, interns and apprentices were involved.
The movie was very expensive - speculated to have a production cost alone of at least NZ$380m.
In an interview with GQ magazine, Cameron confessed to telling studio bosses the film represented “the worst business case in movie history”.
Just to break even, the movie will have to be at least the third or fourth highest-grossing in history. And if it succeeds, the film industry of West Auckland will take much credit.
The production was filmed at Auckland’s Kumeu Film Studios for four months.
There, the production started on big sets before progressing to smaller and simpler sets - and ended with a splash.
“The very last thing we filmed involved dumping 100,000 litres of water on a set. Jim loves this stuff,” he joked, referring to director Cameron.
Avatar started a design department in Auckland in June 2017, and 17 people worked there until relocating to Wellington the following year.
But there was a sequel to the movie’s Auckland chapter.
“In March of 2018 we started the construction in Auckland of the three most complex vehicle sets, piggybacking off the boat-building expertise in the region,” Sinclair said.
The two boats and the aircraft were assembled at Auckland Film Studios in Henderson.
Sinclair said at that time, his team had 43 contractors from Kawakawa in the north to Wanaka in the south.
He said crew started using conventional manufacturing technology on the three vehicle sets but soon moved on to 3D printing components to eliminate wastage.
Sinclair added: “We developed a quick and economic way of producing parts up to four metres long by 3D printing, which we then used for other sets and components.”
Sinclair said the production also surfed on the back of companies who honed skills working on the America’s Cup. He said he worked with some of Rocket Lab’s contractors as well.
Live-action photography started in Wellington in May 2019, navigated Covid disruptions, and wrapped up last December.
Avatar: The Way of Water has its New Zealand release today, and in the rest of the world tomorrow.